vacation time

The blog will be on vacation with its author until late August. My vacation is not all leisurely. If you want to see what I will be devoting my efforts to, go to downeastlakes.org. The land trust over which I preside is within sight of closing a deal on the final 22,000 acres of a project that, together with our prior conservation efforts and those of other conservation and government entities abutting us, will protect an area that is the size of Zion and Yosemite put together. That is saying something in the northeast!

My part in all this will, I think, be the most significant thing I did in my time on earth.

Have a great summer!

Pre-valedictory

This post comprises, by my computation, my third to last monthly column in statewide papers as Vermont Poet Laureate.  As before, I will be taking the summer off from such columns, and my successor will be named in November, this four-year tenure seeming to have gone by, like most things at my age, in a matter of days.

On the 28^th of May, I visited the Vermont Arts Council headquarters, where, with a group of peers, the process of choosing the next state poet began. I cannot, of course, comment on the proceedings, but I can indulge in some generalities, all of them connected to my somewhat melancholy recognition that this intriguing ride will soon be over for me.

Let me first applaud the intelligence, dedication, and good humor of the Arts Council staff, from director Alex Aldrich and program director Michele Bailey to everyone with whom I have dealt in that organization. Their very presence makes me proud to be a Vermonter, to live in a state where the arts play such a vital role not only in our economy but also in our daily lives. The Council’s initiative and responsiveness have more to do with all that than many may realize.

The same can emphatically be said of my fellows on the committee, each so obviously committed to getting this thing right, and taking the time necessary to achieve that end.

And yet, to speak again as a Vermont chauvinist, there surely will be no indisputably right choice. As I looked over the list of nominees, most of whom I know at least slightly, I was thrilled that our tiny state is home to so many gifted artists– and dismayed that we’ll be able to choose only one.

Virtually all of these authors were around at the time of my own appointment, which makes me surprised all over again that I should have been chosen in 2011– and humbled to know that I could scarcely have argued with any number of other selections. I will participate in the final vote with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration. With no false modesty, I can say that every nominee is him- or herself a Poet Laureate in some measure, for it is our collective effort to say things that are hard to say: it is that effort that keeps this cherished art alive here and elsewhere. After my time as state poet, I will never view a poem of my own as other than collaborative.

Speaking of collaboration, I’d never have dreamed that I would write text for the state’s first Cartoonist Laureate, the brilliant and gifted James Kochalka. We have just completed our third project. The Vermont Contemporary Music ensemble, having asked five of the state’s composers to write pieces in response to work of mine, performed two luminous concerts as a result. The fabulous young Philadelphia composer Joseph Hallman set my “Suite in Mudtime” to music performed by soprano and string quartet (in this case Vermont’s own 802 Quartet) at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

And of course, still speaking of collaboration, whatever my contribution to poetry’s health in Vermont may have been, it was merely an adjunct to the contributions not only of the great Mr. Frost but also of the poets appointed after the position was reinstated by Governor Kunin in 1988: Louise Gluck, Galway Kinnell, Grace Paley, Ellen Bryant Voigt, and Ruth Stone. That I should be part of that lineage frankly astounds me.

Yes, I feel lucky. And even more, I feel blessed. If I was surprised by the appointment, after these four years, I am scarcely surprised by how much I regret its ending. So I have been in retrospective mode for a spell now, thinking about all the other benefits –and I simply can’t name each one– that I have experienced in this handful of years.

One is the wit I have enjoyed. The first instance, in fact, transpired while I was still on the phone with Alex Aldrich, who had called with the news. I put the telephone to my chest and whispered “I’m the Poet Laureate!” My youngest daughter, still living at home in 2011, corrected me: “It’s pronounced low-rate.” But I have savored the funny remarks I have encountered at the community libraries, 115 at this writing, where I have given presentations on poetry. The proceedings at the three Montpelier spelling bees at which I have been the pronouncer and emcee have at times been downright hilarious. I could go on.

There is likewise the cordiality I have experienced at virtually every stop. (The one and only exception was an unhappy and unpleasant woman in the west of the state who actually interrupted my reading of a poem by standing up and averring, “That’s not poetry!” Her fellows, however, quickly shushed her.)

Librarians are heroes of mine anyhow, from excellent state librarian Martha Reid to all the librarians, in places tiny and grand and in between, in Vermont: to see the care each took with making these events successful enhanced my feelings in this regard, as did the welcome library patrons inevitably extended.

I was regaled with all manner of thank you gifts, from home-baked pies to chocolates to countless mugs (which for the most part I traitorously transported to our Maine cabin in the woods) to precious books to –perhaps my favorite—a salt dish carved from invasive buckthorn by one of the artisans at Bob and Becca Cummings’s wonderful Center for the Expressive Arts in Montgomery.

There were several instances of pathos as well, chief of which was a woman’s giving me a memorial card to her son, dead far too young, with an excerpt of my writing as its inscription. I trust she understood my tears.

But as I suspected would be the case when I decided on community libraries as my venues of choice, I was most taken by the intelligence of so-called “average” men and women in the crowds. I’m an Ivy League brat, but I learned well before I got to college that that league had no corner on brains and/or creativity. There’s a lot of smart people out there, whatever the nature of their formal education.

I met an inexcusably young man in Randolph who read my poems more penetratingly than I could ever do myself. I came upon a dairy farmer way up on the Quebec border who could recite –I quizzed him pretty thoroughly– every single poem in Robert Frost’s “Mountain Interval.”

Again, I could extend my catalog until I ran out of space. Suffice it to say that what I valued most was how these non-specialists instinctively knew what the important questions were, and how they asked them not, as is too often the case in academic contexts, just to show how much they already knew themselves but in fact to elicit such information as I had means to offer.

And the important questions were and are often the most basic: who’s talking? to whom” where are we? why choose form X rather than form Y? If my poems couldn’t answer those questions, I suspected they needed further work (which quite a number of them got).

As I went on in my tenure, I came to leave more and more time for the Q & A portion, because I was most interested in and most instructed by that portion. To all of you who so brightly participated, my profoundest thanks.

Finally, I am grateful to the editors of the newspapers in which these columns have been published for four years now. They tolerated my opinions, and in many cases helped me to make them clearer. And to those who have contacted me, either in letters to the editor (again, one exception, but why dwell on that?) or personally, my thanks too. You have both encouraged me and kept me as honest as I know how to be.

May you all have wonderful summers.

Two New Poems

                           The Owl and I

Once the half-ass cross got burned on our lawn, my mother lit out

for the north to have me. My father was stationed in Gadsden, Alabama

Prior to World War II, commander of so-called Colored Troops,

And he’d invited a few of his men into the house, you see,

A radical thing back then and there in the heart of Jim-Crow Dixie.

So my mother fled giving birth down there, though I don’t have any idea

Why I’d think of this, which, near to her death, she spoke of so many years after.

Why now, on watching a barred owl coast to a hemlock gone dark at sunfall,

Everything else as well going dark around me here where I stand?

Once, at midnight, Mom thought she’d heard a whoop of human anguish

Outside, and wondered whether some soldier was being lynched. My father

Went out for a look but found nothing. My lifelong relations with my mother

Were vexed, I suspect today, in part because between us two

Lay a lot in common. Jews were crammed into cattle cars right then,

But for Dad and his troops, the evil in Europe yet lay months ahead.

Still, real or imagined, that cry of misery stuck with Mom, no matter

No signs of nearby violence turned up next morning. The company

Came en masse to mess: Shit on a Shingle, as the GIs said,

Dried beef on toast. So life went on, at least for a while– more or less.

It ought to bring comfort that I’m where I am, aging but safe, my clan

Constantly swelling as sons and daughters produce their sons and daughters,

And winter, so harsh this year, gives way at last to spring, with snowdrops

Glinting, the freshets making their evanescent cascades through woods.

I recall how my mother loved this season. Why, then, this lonesome mood?

It feels that I’m in some pitch-black tunnel and won’t get out again,

That this, as the saying goes, is it, and all I have at the end

–Of course there can’t be anything to it– is the sorrowful eight-note anthem

Of that lone owl, the sound just now having reached my vexed old head,

Though I’d be foolish to think that song was addressed to any human.

            Cavaliers

From up here, the valley looks soused

with spring, and whatever I see

seems a gift. Meanwhile, so help me, I wonder

why I never knew a thing

about cribbage. Not that it mattered,

just that back in the ward, my ghost of a roommate,

92 years old,

set up a game to play

with his daughter, who told him they could stay with it

till the Red Sox came on TV.

I gave a huff of relief,

not too loud, I hope, relieved

to know a change was coming

from all those idiot game shows,

the volume turned to headache pitch,

the old man’s droop-lobed ears

even weaker, I guess, than mine.

I lay there fettered: oxygen hose,

monitor, saline IV.

I’d had some chest pains that morning.

Three drawings of blood, all hours apart,

were apparently needed to prove

I’d suffered no incident.

And so, worse luck, I was going to be stuck

for a night with this poor old guy.

The daughter kept saying, “Be patient.”

He’d been in that room for over a month.

So the two of us watched the baseball,

the Sox getting by on breaks,

passed balls and bloops and walks, and squeaking

a victory out in the ninth.

We whooped until he coughed

so hard I rang my buzzer.

A nurse came in and frowned and pinned him.

He choked down a potion that killed

the hack, then fell asleep.

But all night he’d jerk awake and shout,

“Is anybody out there?”

How long can a man be patient?

I wasn’t one to say. I’d be gone

early the following morning,

my diagnosis: heartburn.

Sprung at last, I’ve taken this hike

up a hands-and-knees ridge to rejoice

in a healthy heart. Yes, the world

appears suffused with a sort of grace.

There’s the scent of melting snow,

muddy soil, wet duff.

Gray frogs chortle from vernal pools,

the freshets tinkle downhill,

woodpeckers rattle the air,

new growth festoons the tips of boughs,

and sky is far more vivid

than what we call sky-blue.

 So why on earth should I think about cribbage?

No matter. I wouldn’t set out

before I looked it up–

research, old-style, in a reference book.

Reading, I heard gurneys jangle,

a PA, alarms that signaled

sad souls trying to get up from beds

that they were meant to stay in.

I hear that clamor now,

even these miles and hours away. 

Cribbage seems to have been invented

by John Suckling, near-forgotten

seventeenth-century writer and peer,

said to be “carefree and witty,”

features of poets called the Cavaliers.

The Grace of Incorruption

This post is distinctly different from any of its predecessors. In it, I will try to sell you on a book called “The Grace of Incorruption,” written by a great man and a great friend who died in 2010.

When I tell you that the book’s subtitle is “The Selected Essays of Donald Sheehan on Orthodox Faith and Poetics,” you’ll see why I imagine a challenge to my efforts. Not all readers will share even my radical-Protestant Christian vision; still fewer, I’m sure, will share the late author’s Eastern Orthodox Christianity. As one who himself instinctively recoils from the very notion of “orthodoxy,” whether religious, political, or social, I myself seem an unlikely promoter of such a volume.

But Don Sheehan’s example gives me pause, and more. Anyone who knew Don, a professor at Dartmouth and elsewhere and, more significantly, for over a quarter century the director of the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, will remember highly unusual qualities in the man. He was one of those rarest of people who, upon entering a room, immediately change its atmosphere for the better. Don seemed somehow lit from within, and whether you shared his spiritual take on human existence or not, you saw that his was a spirit of all but incomparable kindness and compassion. Not that Don ever confronted you with his faith. Rather, in his manner and his thought, he exemplified the deep values it had produced in him.

Even physically, Don was a striking figure on the streets of Hanover, or anywhere: as a subdeacon in his church, he wore a magnificent, long, white beard, one to put Santa Claus’s to shame. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and dressed with what seemed an almost studied plainness. But that light I spoke of surrounded him everywhere he went.

It is thus all but unimaginable to me that this gentle soul had apparently been, in younger years before I knew him, a street gang hooligan, a motorcycle jockey, a hell-raiser, modeling himself on the James Dean of “Rebel Without a Cause.” Be that as it may, in the opening chapter of “The Grace of Incorruption,” we see that the seeds of his life after hooliganism, his later life of spiritual wisdom, were planted –and in most improbable ways– when he was a mere child.

At nine years old, Don was shot. The bullet barely missed his heart. The shooter was his best friend, and the two boys had come on a big brother’s target pistol. In his recollection of his experience in the emergency room, however, Don emphasizes the serenity he felt on looking up at the strongly built doctor who skillfully removed the bullet. That serenity would recur to him, often in unpredictable circumstances.

For example, a few weeks after the shooting accident, the Sheehan family broke apart. Don’s father was a violent and abusive alcoholic, and Don vividly recalls blood on his mother’s face from the man’s brutal beatings, which were frequent and savage.  In due course, his mother opted to flee her husband with the children. 

Yet before that, according to the introductory essay, there was a particularly brutal episode, the father raging, breaking dishes, terrifying Don’s sister and brother. But Don recounts a miracle, which, along with the hospital episode I just mentioned, seems to me determinative not only of the spiritual tack he would later take but also of his literary views (though to separate these two dimensions is impossible in Don’s case).

“Then I did something that still takes my breath away. I walked across the living room and sat down on the couch right next to him. I picked up a magazine from the coffee table and opened to the first pictures I came to, and I pointed to one. ‘Look, Dad, isn’t that interesting?’...

“No answer. After a moment, I looked up at him, and I found that he was looking down at me. Over fifty years later I can still see my father’s eyes. They were sad eyes, yet peaceful, warm, and profoundly young, with all the wildness gone out and, in place of it, something like stillness. And I felt all at once peaceful, the way I’d felt on the operating table at the hospital three weeks before.

“He looked at me for a long, long minute, and then he spoke. ‘You’re the only one not afraid of me.’”

I call these events determinative because Don Sheehan’s world-view depended upon penetrating to the deepest sort of darkness– from which he perceived a redemptive light.

That light suffused Don’s introductions to visiting poets at the Frost Place, which were famous for their penetration. However diverse the cast of authors in his thirty years there, Sheehan seemed somehow to find the spiritual nugget that made each what he or she was. Many of those poets –and I count myself among the many, having heard his spoken introductions and read his treatment of two of my poems in this collection– were astounded to understand their own work better by virtue of these pre-reading commentaries. With the exception of poet Nicholas Samaras, a fellow in Orthodoxy, none, I believe, would have used St. Isaac the Syrian or Dionysos the Aereopagite as the grounds of appreciation, but none, either, could deny that Don’s church fathers had produced in him a stunningly keen insight.

I think poet and director of the International Writers’ Program in Iowa City Christopher Merrill has it just right in his excellent introduction. “Humility,” Merrill writes, “is the cornerstone of (Sheehan’s) faith; the quality of attention on display in these pages, a form of prayer dedicated to revealing the sacred aspects of literature, is rooted in his belief that knowledge is limited; his observations, drawn in part from his experience of working with a range of poets at the Frost Place ..., shed light not only on the creative process but on the religious imagination. In this book the subdeacon and the professor work hand in glove.”

Perhaps the most compelling of all Christian paradoxes, in fact, shows through here: humility, the trait that Don so personified, is precisely the one that can illuminate our world– and here, our poetry. In the first half of his collection, “Reflections on Life, Literature, and Holiness,” Sheehan examines works by Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Frost, Salinger, and contemporary poets like Jane Kenyon, me, and Samaras, addressing the nature of prayer, of individual liberty, of depression, and so much more. The teaming of churchman and intellectual results, as I say, in unusual and keen readings of all these writers.

I won’t gloss Don’s religious conversion here, since it is so much more movingly recounted by the man himself in the first half of the collection. Trust me: to call it an intriguing narrative is to lack for words.

The second half of “The Grace of Incorruption” enters the majestic domain of the Psalms.  (Don, who commanded classical Greek, in fact translated the Greek Orthodox Septuagint rendering of Psalms.) The psalter is no doubt one of the truly originative and influential collections of poems in the western canon. As Chris Merrill, again, once said at the Frost Place: “It is not possible to imagine poetry in any Western tongue without the imagery, insights, and ideas of the Psalms, the ground of our inheritance.”  No one was more familiar with that ground than Don Sheehan.

The focus of Part Two is particularly on psalm 119 (118 in Orthodox tradition), often called the Wisdom Psalm, and one ingeniously assembled. Overall, it describes the divine plan for creation in a complex, alphabetic-acrostic format. The longest psalm, in fact the longest chapter in the Bible, each of its twenty-two stanzas (all octets) begins with a Hebrew letter and all display a wide diversity of rhetorical and musical techniques. Given the breadth of its scope, it’s small wonder that psalm 119 has so inspired poets from the virtual dawn of our literary tradition. To that extent, any poetry enthusiast, even if he or she be the most committed of atheists, will discover that attention to Donald Sheehan’s brilliant reading and interpretation will repay the considerable effort it requires.

I can’t end these remarks without expressing personal thanks, which I hope, on seeing “The Grace of Incorruption,” you will share, to its editor Xenia Sheehan, the author’s wife, without whom this striking book would not be known to us.  Mrs. Sheehan faced many challenges: her husband died at 70, of what turns out to have been the effects of long-misdiagnosed Lyme Disease, and in the final months of his life he had essentially been reduced to silence by his illness, able only to write tragically terse notes. He had not imagined a volume of these essays, so Xenia Sheehan had to piece them together as well as she could without his guidance.

And as well as she could seems to have been very, very well indeed.

Aesthetic Confusion

Walter Benjamin famously opined that every monument to beauty is also a monument to barbarism. Mont St. Michele, for instance, so grand and gorgeous on its spit of land, demanded unimaginable labor and doubtless suffering amongst those who did the grunt work. That was my first thought on seeing the abbey, even though I was a witless, late-teenager, not yet inclined to ponder the world's ambiguities.

But one's aesthetic sense can be addled even by the natural world. Seeing the hawk I describe in this poem attempt (vainly, as it turned out) to murder a squirrel– well, first of all, it would have been imbecilic to anthropomorphize the whole scene, as if the squirrel were a mere innocent and the raptor a villain. These creatures were simply doing what such creatures do. And yet I found myself, for all of that, uncertain whether I was glad for or disappointed by the predator's failure to succeed in his/her intention.

Here's what resulted:

 Aesthetics

Tuesday. Somewhere I’d guess around the 4000^th

one of my life, and I’m washing my coffee pot

and putting it onto the dish rack, the way I’ve done

every Wednesday too, every Thursday, every Friday,

Saturday, and Monday for many years–

most of the 72 by now– so there’s nothing

that you’d call thought in the process, and then –whoosh!–

like thrilling cascade or comet, in broadest daylight

a broadwing hawk swoops in and scatters the finches

from the feeder, which, whatever we try, is a feeder

for squirrels as well, both red and gray. It’s a gray

the hawk had his eye on, and the hawk seems big as a hog,

though he’s lithe and deft and unbelievably quick

in his stoop. Which misses, however. His quarry cartwheels

under a stunted pine I’ve meant again

and again to hew to better the view we have

through this same kitchen window. And now, as something you might

call thought returns after all, I’m pondering whether

I’m glad to have left it standing. The hawk was lordly,

as much as the eagle my wife reported seeing

last week, which started an almost identical dive

but flared up the ridge when he found no game out there

among spilled seeds, where the blood on wet March snow

would in either case have shown so gorgeous, so brilliant.

The look of the squirrel would of course have been pathetic,

no doubt about that. The world’s a puzzling place.

Narrative Values

Tomorrow evening I will be giving a talk on poetry at an excellent independent bookstore in Norwich, Vermont, not far from where I live, but on the other side of what some of us jokingly call The Volvo Line. It is called "Narrative Values, Lyric Poems: Inviting the Reader In." Below, I excerpt just a few sections of it to give the drift.

Please excuse the odd formatting, which I seem powerless to amend.

...Nothing I say tonight has doctrinal value. I try never to make the

claim That’s not poetry, simply because there have likely always been almost as many different notions of what poetry is as there are poets.

No, I have no sweeping take on what poetry may be. Even if I did, however, it wouldn’t be very important. What I’ll really be talking about tonight is my own practice as a writer. And my practice is my practice not because it represents the “right” way but because it’s my practice, if you’ll allow me some circular logic. I don’t want to make what I can do the measure of virtue in poetry and therefore make everything else into a vice. That itself would be a vice called narcissism. It would also exclude any number of my favorite contemporary poets, maybe in fact most of them, from my inner circle.

No, I have no sweeping take on what poetry may be. Even if I did, however, it wouldn’t be very important. What I’ll really be talking about tonight is my own practice as a writer. And my practice is my practice not because it represents the “right” way but because it’s my practice, if you’ll allow me some circular logic. I don’t want to make what I can do the measure of virtue in poetry and therefore make everything else into a vice. That itself would be a vice called narcissism. It would also exclude any number of my favorite contemporary poets, maybe in fact most of them, from my inner circle.....

I want to speak of narrative values in lyric poetry not merely because I employ them but simply because I think they can help us avoid the sort of density, even impenetrability, of many a contemporary poem read, say, in The New Yorker– the sort of writing, as I see it, that can give poetry a really bad name even among people who read a lot, who come to libraries and good bookstores like this one.....

My friend, the brilliant Garret Keizer, tells me that when the 1973 Arab-Israeli war broke out, Israeli conscripts rushed home to get their rifles, which they were obliged to own, and copies of poetry collections by the great Yehuda Amichai. That is an extreme example, of course, but perhaps illustrative: I find it impossible to imagine anyone’s running home for copies of the cleverness and self-indulgent word-play that marks so much of current fare.

Before I proceed further, I should tell you that many younger editors are all but militantly anti-narrative. At 72, then, I’m doubtless quaint, and becoming more so in ways that I don’t even recognize, but that those younger people will. So be it. I’m old enough not to care what the smart and hip people think.  

As the title of my presentation suggests, I want poems that invite readers in, rather than ones that exclude them, and this is what in my opinion narrative values can help us with.

Mind you, I say narrative values, which is not the same as talking about writing narrative poetry– with actual plot, beginning, middle, and end. I have written a certain amount of such poetry, and I have surely enjoyed it in other writers, all the way from the extraordinary epics of Milton and Spenser to much of Frost’s longer work to Ellen Bryant Voigt’s Kyrie to a lot of Sharon Olds’s poetry to the matchless story-poems of B.H. Fairchild to fabulous stuff by Maine’s poet laureate, Wesley McNair .....  

Narrative values, the values of conventional short fiction, ones that my generation learned about in grammar school: character, plot, and setting– I think they come in as a way of inviting the reader into your creation.

For me, in any case, there are a few basic questions I pose to any draft I produce, and they are much related to character, setting, and plot. Who’s talking? To whom is he or she talking? Where is the speaker on delivering the words we read? Answers to these questions in the trombone poem are impossible for me to find. The speaker, whatever strange beast he is, could be anywhere as he waits for a letter containing the word “trombone,” though why he should desire such a letter is mysterious in the first place; so I lack a sense of setting. Who the speaker is remains totally unclear; I have no sense of character. I want that sense, and if I write or read a poem in the first person, I want the character named I to show some characterological qualities too– I am not interested in the thoughts or feelings of a mere pronoun. In this case, if the poem were unattributed, just for trivial example, we could equally imagine its speaker to be female as male. If I can’t even know be sure of something so apparently trivial as that, how may I be expected to know what my students have always called “deeper meanings”?

Who, way, what, where? If my poem can’t answer at least some of these questions, I feel I need to work on it further.

As the saying goes, I want to know, in my poem or someone else’s, what’s the story here? Not knowing that, not knowing, as my generation used to say, where the speaker is coming from, I feel not invited in but– almost intentionally it seems– excluded. I feel a need to know some encoded language, or some other secret, in order to enter the poem. Lacking the knowledge of who-what-where-why, etc., I turn away– and that, for me, is about the last effect I want to have on my reader.

Again, as writer, and in fact as reader too, I ask those basic questions of the unit of language before me: who’s talking, to whom, where, and why? Who is the character or characters? Where do they find themselves? I don’t need a plotted story per se, but I want those seemingly factual issues to be as clear as possible.

Does this mean that as writers we need to “dumb down” our poems? Scarcely. Poetry by its nature is engaged with complex feelings and thoughts. But there is a vast difference between complexity and mere complication. ...That's the difference, to my taste, between Robert Frost, one of the most complex minds in our literary history, and Ezra Pound, one of the most complicated.

If as poets we present complex material, we are already challenging our readers to pay very close attention. There is no speed-reading of poetry, no scanning for story. Why would we want to expand that challenge to include what I have called simple facts: who, what, where why? Again, the presentation of such facts is what I call the invitation to the reader. To use a famous example, that reader may say, “This is tough stuff to sort out, but at least this much I can know”:

                 

                Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

                And sorry I could not travel both

                And be one traveler, long I stood

                And looked down one as far as I could

                To where it bent in the undergrowth.

             We have a starting point for the famous instance I use here. A sort of door has been held open to us as we move into a poem that, though often reduced to a mere pep talk about self-reliance, is in fact profoundly ambiguous and finally even mysterious, perhaps like all good lyric.

And so on.....

#####################################################

Here is a recent poem dealing with an unusual physical (and, it seems, psychological) condition.

        Anosmia

A student told me this story,

because the one she’d written

used the word, anosmia,

which I’d never heard and which

the one on the page did not

define or refer to again.

It just said the protagonist

had such a condition and then

went along without pause about race-cars,

machines that traveled much faster

than anything should. The girl

had fallen for one of the drivers

and ended up in a trap.

He was clearly a son of a bitch.

All that NASCAR lore, I confess,

was stuff I’d always dismissed

as pure yahoo, but it had its appeal.

The love plot didn’t– way

too familiar, the kind of thing

that any young person will say

in writing, or if so inclined,

face-to-face. I’m afraid that old tale

couldn’t hold me for long. I’m jaded,

I guess. But anosmia... well,

I’ve always been crazy for words,

and I wanted that one for me.

It kicked off the more gripping story:

her dad was an EMT,

and as a small girl she’d peeked

inside his vinyl bag

and found the smelling salts.

What are these for? she begged,

and although he didn’t want to,

she insisted, he gave in,

she took a sniff and –poof!–

she’d never smell again.

That as I say made a better

tale than what she wrote,

which was same-old-same-old-same old.

I waited her out while she spoke,

then asked her about her sense

of taste. She said all she cared for

was Mexican cooking or Thai,

and only the spiciest flavors.

She’d soon enough gotten used

to mouth-searing pepper and sauce.

They never bothered her now.

My mind strayed off, because

I was close to her father’s age,

and what I mostly conjured

was how that man must have tried

his hardest not to surrender

but did, and then– too late.

He’d likely meant to do good.

Don’t most of us strive for that?

Driving home, I looked out

on a late March moon, and directly

beside it, Aldebaran,

brightest star in Taurus.

And if you have any faith in

this sort of thing (I don’t),

the Bull always craves reward.

Born in that sign, you’re a sucker

for wet kisses, fine wine and food.

What can it possibly feel like,

if you have a decent heart,

to have made so small a mistake

and deprived your child of all that,

anosmia hanging on

in the life of a daughter you love?

Fo you go on replaying that moment?

I don’t know, but my guess is you must.

I remembered a woodsman named Don.

He and two wives had a slew

of kids. His manner was terse,

but he had a nose for truth.

(That moon looked sharp as an axe-blade.)

I got thinking of something he said,

and not about children only:

Some damned strange traps is set.

 

 

 













 

Confessions of a Language Nerd

I have been to over a hundred Vemont libraries since my 2011 installation as Vermont Poet Laureate. In those visits, the question I’m most frequently asked is “Why doesn’t that rhyme?” I’ve considered that in prior blog posts, so in this one, I’ll look, at least to begin with, at the second most frequently asked: “Where do you get your inspiration?”

Well, fact is, I’m not quite sure I believe in inspiration. At least I have surely never believed some higher power had singled me out as a medium. But come to think of it, I do sometimes feel at that as if I were being drawn along in unexpected ways, and usually in surprising directions. That’s when I abandon myself to my own material, and such a development can pass in my case for inspiration. It is certainly the greatest payoff I experience as a writer.

Just what, however, do I mean by my own materials? Well, language of course. Its properties can be –indeed, they have to be– my guiding lights above all. Now I know that sounds vague enough. On the other hand, would we charge a painter with vagueness for referring to paint as her material? Who would question a composer’s saying that notes were his? From that perspective, it does seem strange that so many readers (not to mention literary critics and English teachers) hop right over so self-evident a truth as that poets’ primary material is language. Too often, in responding to poetry, they begin by snooping around for what must have been the originating “idea.” I should plead guilty, especially in literature classes, of the same error on a bad day.

But the plain truth, at least in my own experience, is that so-called ideas come after the fact. Word takes me to idea, not the other way around.

Much of this has to do, of course, with a certain proclivity of mine: I am a language nerd, and in fact I think poets need to be language nerds. That I am nerdy in precisely that way may explain my almost overwhelming delight in having taken part for three consecutive years in the Cabin Fever Spelling Bee, held at Montpelier, Vermont’s Kellogg-Hubbard Library, most recently on the final day of February this year. I have been pronouncer, definer, putter-into-sentences, and judge of the competition.

I’ve lately been pondering why, the moment that annual event is over, I start looking forward to next year’s. The subject of this column is my devotion to language. But such devotion, of course, is personal and not the prime ingredient in the great fun of the Cabin Fever Spelling Bee. There is always a full-house audience, and its members have a lot of pleasures to choose from or combine, not least the beauty and commodiousness of the library building itself. They also sense and contribute to the event as a genuinely communal event. Its meticulous organization is patent: with clarity and eloquence, library board chair Tom McKone explains the contest’s rules both to players and crowd; Rachel Senechal, head librarian, sees to every last detail of logistics; Rick Winston, Andrea Serota, and George Spaulding deftly assemble a list of words, which grows more challenging with each new round of the three.

Of course, the contestants make the event what it is in the end. They are divided into two groups: Vermont readers and Vermont writers. I especially enjoy the good-natured joshing between the camps, and between competitors and me. Before the event, all straight-faced,  the locally celebrated author and humorist Willem Lange asked me if English was my native language; during the game itself, he remarked that it resembled a cavalry charge: “Every time you look around there are fewer horses.” Sometimes the banter is actually among members of one team, and indeed in one case, within one family, slam master poet Geof Hewitt and his witty son Ben.

This year, for the second time in a row, the grand champion was young adult fictionist (and so much more), Roberta Harold; the runner-up, also for the second consecutive year, was reader Emily Tredeau. But there was keen competition right along. I think of the bright, poised 85-year-old Maxine Leary, a former school teacher whose student I would love to have been.

But in the end, my keenest attraction to the Cabin Fever bee may well be that language nerdiness of mine, all of which may have started, though I didn’t know it then, in 6^th grade Latin class with Mr. Richard Cutler and continued, annually, through the class of Mr. Zygmund Wardzinski, Polish refugee and polymath. Though I was just the sort of adolescent student who made choosing not to teach at that level a no-brainer, I did do well in Latin. It seemed a silly thing to be studying, yes, but it came to me easily, and I could count on its providing me one of the few easy A’s (or any A’s) I got back then.

Little did I know that my grounding in Latin (and French, taught by the best instructor I ever had, kindergarten through Ph.D., the late Ted Wright) would be enormously helpful when I elected to teach myself Italian in my forties. Still less could I have predicted how stimulating it would be to sense, almost immediately, the etymological journey of most words I encounter. Though our ancestral Anglo-Saxon was the language of Germanic people in England from the 5^th century through the Norman Conquest, its melding of  Teutonisms with Latinate idioms (which had already felt the significant effect of Greek ones) have made English a tongue that’s full of potential for poets, indeed for all us language nerds.

As words occur to me in a poem, then, they bear the freight of their own history, no matter my German is scanty and my Greek almost nonexistent. To consider that history somehow helps me to surrender to them in the way I’ve mentioned.

Consider, in fact, a word I used in that last sentence: I mean– “consider.”  Its first syllable, “con” is related o German “kennen” (to know) and Latin “sidus, sider” (star). Though in our time we use the word very casually, its originative value involved knowing the stars.

A related value attends our word “disaster,” which literally means an ill-starred occurrence, combining “dis,” connoting negation, or “dys,” meaning bad, with another root for star, in this case “astrum.” The Latin influence is patent (and of course “influence,” like “influenza,” means a flowing in, for good or ill, from.... the stars).

We could speak at length of that prefix, “dis” or “dys,” and in dis-cussing it, we would be harkening, awares or unawares, to its value up to and through Anglo-Saxon times. A discussion, derived from “dis,” in this case meaning “apart,” and the Latin verb “quatere,” “to shake,” became “discutere,” signifying, literally, a shaking apart. Given the nature of discussion in the contemporary U.S. Congress, say, one might almost believe the word is reverting to its earliest implications.

I could go on and on in this way. It’s a bit like finding a favorite song or singer on YouTube: you listen to it or her or him or them and you are reminded of other favorites; you look those up, and in the process come on a musician or a tune you hadn’t known. There may be more of my readers who can identify with such a reference (such a “carrying back”) than with my own nerdy gorging on etymologies and linguistic history. But there are clearly enough of the latter to fill up the beautiful main room of the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier.